I was concerned to read a recent article - Kosovo "Freedom Fighters" Financed by Organised Crime (9 April 1999) - by Canadian economist Michel Chossudovsky, about the war between Nato and Serbia over the status of Kosovo. Chossudovsky argues that the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) are into organised crime - indeed an integral part of the European drug network - and that the US government has connections with this network that it needs to protect. Hence, Chossudovsky argues, the United States has gone to war in support of the KLA. The parallel text is that the former Yugoslavia was destabilised in the late 1980s and early 1990s by the IMF (International Monetary Fund), also acting as an agent for US strategic interests.

While there may be elements of truth in Chossudovsky's bleak story, it is a kind of conspiratorial theory that creates its own dangers. The Great Depression of the 1930s was popularly attributed to various conspiracies involving global finance, Jews, organised crime, and communism. Ultimately belief in these stories proved more damaging to the world than did the Depression.

The world has changed since WW1 and WW2. WW1 was a contest of national power within Europe and the Middle-East. WW2 was a four-way contest over ideology (liberalism, fascism, Marxism and nationalism [Japan]). The present war is neither. It is a development of a situation that started with the belated rejection of appeasement in 1939; it is an attempt by the international community to police a criminal government. As such, it signals more strongly than anything before that governments do not have the "sovereign" right to commit crimes on their own people.

The KLA is irrelevant, or at most an annoying complication to a simple story. (If the KLA didn't exist, then the Serbian government would have invented them as a pretext to implement its policy to colonise Kosovo with ethnic Serbs.) The simple story is that the people of Kosovo needed protection from the international community. If the British Government had tried to rid Northern Ireland of its Catholic population, it would have been equally appropriate for the international community to do whatever it could to stop the British Government and to protect the people of Ulster. The status of the IRA (Irish Republican Army) would have been irrelevant.

We are seeing a process of effective international law in evolution. That process has accelerated markedly since the end of the Cold War in 1990. Much of that process involves economic matters - eg the evolution of the WTO (World Trade Organisation) - and will develop soon into areas of international financial regulation, taxation and conservation. Much of that process involves wrong turns (eg the WTO); evolution always works that way.

As the globalisation of effective and accountable public administration takes place, the international community can be criticised for many things; in particular consistency, disunity, misplaced priorities and plain stupidity. Nevertheless the process is essential to the future of humankind. Conversely, it is the cynicism, negativity, blamethrowing and inertia implicit in Chossudovsky's worldview that leads to real danger, just as ethnic-based conspiracy theories gave us the holocaust that was World War 2.

The problem of the last 45 years has been the inability of the United Nations Security Council to do the job that it was set up to do. Even after 1990, the Security Council has been hamstrung. It was the US veto that led to inaction over the genocide in Rwanda. At present NATO is the only other organisation that is anything like capable of enforcing sanctions against humanitarian crimes such as genocide and "ethnic cleansing". Hopefully, NATO will evolve into a true international police force; what the Security Council should have been but wasn't. And hopefully, like any good police force, the it will maintain an international 'beat' (ie reassuring presence, everywhere), preventing rather than simply punishing crime, and creating a sufficient presence everywhere to give people some confidence that they are safe from criminal actions perpetrated by their own governments. The better metaphor for an international police force is the neighbourhood cop; not the armed offenders squad.

Yes NATO was stupid and naïve in not expecting the criminal acts of the Serbian government and the Serbian paramilitary forces to increase following any bombing campaign. The best kind of protection today is to have observers on the ground who can, through the Internet and other media, ensure that the world can see any criminal activity that is taking place. Even the presence of journalists gave a better measure of protection than do the bombs and cruise missiles.

Ultimately, protection can be achieved only through the development of an international social wage. Countries should only benefit from it they subscribe to an enforceable code of conduct on human rights. An international police force - an integral part of such an international social wage - would operate much as the American FBI and National Guard do (or should) operate. For example, the federal government can enforce anti-lynching laws that state police forces once turned a blind eye to.

The IMF is an example of a deeply flawed international bureaucracy. But it cannot be blamed all of the ills that some attribute to it. After all, New Zealand has taken the economic "reform" process further than the IMF would have ever asked us to do. Yet New Zealand is not like Serbia, Indonesia, Sierra Leone or Rwanda.

The IMF's main faults are its unaccountability and its economic naivety. There is a logical economic theory that suggests that a nation's woes can be resolved by a mixture of devaluation and fiscal discipline. The theory doesn't work because the international economy does not work anything like the theory assumes it works. Like the CIA in the 1960s, the IMF is incompetent rather than at the centre of every rumoured conspiracy. The IMF is capable of evolving into an international central bank; a bank that will remain a part of the problem if it's constitution is anything like the New Zealand Reserve Bank Act!

The evolution of a democratically accountable international public service is going to be a slow mistake-ridden process. But progress is being made. Genocide, political torture and "ethnic cleansing" are unacceptable today in ways that they were not during the Balkan Wars of the 1900s, in Turkey (on ethnic Armenians) in the 1910s, in China in the 1960s' cultural revolution, and in Cambodia in the 1970s.

Let's work to improve international law, not to debunk it. "Civil" war is an international crime. Let's work to create an international social wage - including an international protection force - rather than to cynically sit back and decry our few faltering steps to remove anarchy from international relations.

Sovereignty is about being responsible for (owning) and collectively benefiting from our common resources, including our international commons. Global anarchy - which is what giving "sovereign" national governments unlimited rights over their people implies - represents a tragedy in the commons.
 

PS (12 April): New Zealand has decided to send a logistical "Kiwiaid" team to the Balkans. And we have decided to settle (ie not merely hold) 200 Kosovan refugees with relatives in New Zealand. I think that's great; our government recognises NZ's interest in being a good citizen in the world's community of nations. Many comments about Kosovo, including such as some in tonight's Ralston Live television show, however, still exhibit amoral nationalist thinking. They are concerned that "Yugoslavia is a long way away", and that New Zealand "has no national interest" in Europe, whereas it does in say Indonesia (see my "Montenegro and West Papua").

What is New Zealand's national interest in the modern world; in the 'global village'? New Zealand is a member of the international community, so its interest is that of the international community. It is in the interest of the international community of nations to ensure that local communities are secure from the criminal ravages of delinquent governments and paramilitary forces. Wars are never civil, no matter how many blind eyes we turn to them.

© 1999   Keith Rankin

Rankin File | 1999 titles